Really looking forward to being at Greenbelt again this coming weekend. The programme – from the talks to the music to the comedy to the campaigning is as strong as ever and, I feel, has a nice edge to it too. (Full talks listings here)

For those who are going to be there, I’m going to be doing two main talks, and chairing a panel discussion too.

The first talk is A Plea for Christian Piracy (Sat, 5:15pm), which ties in with a major article in this month’s Third Way magazine as well as a section in the new book. By examining piracy in all its forms – from Somali hijackers to DVD rippers to mythical Blackbeards – I’m making a case that what pirates ultimately do is blaze a trail into heresy which the establishment can later follow into orthodoxy… Which is why, eye patch and parrot and all, I’d like to make a case for Jesus as genuinely piratical, and also give some insight into why children are endlessly fascinated with pirates. If you’ve got any good pirate jokes I can use in the talk (fully credited of course!) then drop them here.

The second talk is entitled ‘God is Strange, We are Stranger: Theology and the New Physics’ (Monday 11:15am) and will be familiar to those who have followed this blog recently. I was really excited to have booked Manjit Kumar to speak at the festival, but when he had to pull out due to illness I thought it’d be good for someone to do something on this tip, so thought I’d give it a go. Expect some parallels between the development of physics and theology, and why we ignore scientific advancement at our peril.

Finally, I’m chairing a debate on priesthood, sacraments and emerging worship (Monday 2pm), with a great panel consisting of Pete Rollins, Beth Keith, Paula Gooder and Father Simon Rundell. It’s one of those topics that opens out onto some very rich and important themes, so should be very interesting.

There are so many other fantastic speakers I could mention here, but you’ll have to simply have a browse yourself, or download the talks after the festival. Do come and say hello though. I’ll hopefully be making some announcements about some exciting developments in the coming year too.

After hearing a chance snippet of something on the radio last week, I’ve been thinking about what is known in Mathematics/Physics/Astronomy as the ‘three body problem.’ It remains one of the great questions in Mathematics as to whether it will ever be solved, or if indeed it actually can be.

The essence of the problem is simple: take three heavy masses (planets/moons/astral bodies) and give them an initial position and velocity. Can we calculate what the subsequent motion of these three bodies will be?

The mathematics is perfectly well understood – the laws of gravitational attraction are easy to write down, and for just two bodies the calculations are simple. But add a third body, another other, and the calculations become not only fiendishly complex but, according to some great minds, actually insoluable. Some special cases are open to analysis, but no general solution appears within reach: the motion of the three bodies cannot be predicted and will not be captured by our infinitessimal calculus. In practice? The motion of the sun and earth and moon can only be estimated. The tide cannot be predicted perfectly.

As a Mathematician and amateur theologian, coming across problems like this makes me reflect synthetically. I am the earth, you the moon and God the sun, each of us with our gravity, each our own graces, our own orbits. Despite all the power of the machines and algorithms we have around us, no one can predict the future trajectory of our interactions, whether we will spin into chaos, collapse and collide or find some periodic stability.

And this is both the problem and beauty of our engagement with the other, and the Other: not only is the subsequent motion complex, it may well be incalcuable. The rational, material, scientific mind has to admit defeat. As in the heavenly bodies, so on earth: we can only estimate where the forces of attraction may take us.

It struck me today that this same idea could be applied morally too. At each moment of decision, thought or action, the Many Worlds Interpretation suggests that a quantum split occurs for each possible outcome. In one universe I think that terrible thought; in another I don’t.

So in amongst this near-infinity of parallel universes there exists, according to the MWI, a universe in which I have made all the right decisions, thought all the purest thoughts and acted in the most gracious and loving way. Indeed, if this is true, theoretically there will exist one parallel universe in which we have all done so.

It is the Quantum Heaven. It is not this universe. And there may be no dogs there.

The idea that an external observer was required to ‘collapse the wavefunction’ of reality obviously didn’t sit well with physics, as it seemed to require a ‘big’ external observer to make the universe real. Physicists didn’t like that one bit, and eventually salvation came in the form of Hugh Everett III, a brilliant theoretical physicist (and father to E of the band Eels) whose ‘multiverse’ thesis had lain gathering dust for years…until it was rediscovered and embraced by the quantum community. It proposed that each quantum event precipitated a split – a new universe was created. Thus the ‘objective reality of wavefunction collapse is denied.’ And the script for Sliding Doors was born. And the need for an ‘external observer’ is removed.

This ‘Many Worlds Interpretation‘ is not without its problems though. One major theoretical obstacle is that it appears to make us eternal. At the point of our death a ‘quantum event’ occurs, and in one universe we die, while in a parallel one we continue to live. In this parallel universe where we are still alive, we may then again come to death, and once again there is a quantum event, and we continue to live in one universe and die in another. Thus, the MWI has major theological implications, and were it able to be proven true – rather than just mathematically water-tight as a theory – it would be a genuine deal-breaker for pretty much the whole of orthodox theology.

However, physicists are still undecided as to whether MWI is a good theory or not. What is clear is that the development of quantum theory and the new physics has led science into a very strange place, which requires some serious leaps of faith into very hard to believe areas: near-infinite parallel universe, constantly splitting apart and being created because of hard-to-pin-down quantum events.

They have then, perhaps, come full circle to stand with us theologians. As we both seek to understand this strange world, using all the faculties that we have, we end up in places of faith and doubt and apparent miracle. It is no good for the theologians to dismiss science as cold reason, nor for scientists to dismiss theology as untestable nonsense. We need to work and think together, to probe this strange world for its truths, while humbly accepting that we will never see the whole truth clearly.

In the previous post I extended the argument that it is impossible for a person in a n-dimensional universe to observe with any proper perspective an (n+k)-dimensional universe, to propose that the reverse is also true: an observer in a higher dimensional space can never fully appreciate what life is like in a lower dimensional universe without actually entering it themselves. Theologically put: the incarnation was necessary, because without it God could never fully empathise with the human condition. As Zizek puts it: ‘Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.’

I finished by asking the question how that could happen: how could the divine possibly become incarnate? It is a question that has beaten some of the greatest minds, so I don’t hope to offer any profound answer. But I feel that physics may have something to tell us, at least metaphorically.

The history of quantum theory shows it proceeding from the cooly rational of classical physics into the mysterious world of equations. There were to be no more pictures of atoms. There was nothing to see, unless we chose to see it. To put it as simply as I can understand it, the particles that make up matter are not circling like planets, or embedded in something like a plum pudding. They exist as a ‘wavefunction’ – a matrix of all possible possibilities which can then ‘collapse’ into a particular state. This wavefunction collapse occurs when a ‘quantum event’ happens: like an external observer taking a look. Reality, some would go as far as putting it, is no more than a collapsed wavefunction.

What is interesting about this theory is that, given the extent to which we believe our universe to be ‘real’, it requires an external observer to collapse its wavefunction. Could it be that God is this external observer? If so, the poetic idea of God as sustainer of the world takes on a new form: for the universe to be real at all requires a presense to be observing it, to be looking over it.

Physics, as you can imagine, did not like this idea at all, though it took a while for salvation to be found. The solution, however, was perhaps even more strange than the idea it was meant to replace. And we’ll finish this series by looking at that in the next post.

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore some of the implications that the ‘new physics’ might have on our theology. It is worth emphasising that I strongly believe that the new physics must have an impact on our theology. If it, or indeed any new scientific discovery, does not then we are failing in our task as theologians. Which is why there may be an announcement forthcoming about a new venture some of us may be beginning in London to address this specifically: technology/meta/physics – we need to be working to co-evolve these disciplines.

In the previous post I shared some thoughts regarding dimensions, and the impossibility of creating an experiment in one dimensional universe to show the existence of a higher dimensional one. It is, however, possible to show what shaped universe we live in. Imagine a flat piece of paper, representing the space-time we exist in. We could fold that paper into a cylinder, and then (and this is lovely flexible paper!) connect the two ends of that cylinder together… to create a hollow donut shape, called a torus. Theoretically, two spaceships could be sent out on perpendicular paths and, if our universe was of this ‘shape’ they would not meet at any point other than the point of departure.

But, while it’s possible for us observing the animation above to consider the space outside of the torus, the space within which the torus exists, for those living within the dimensional space of the torus this is totally impossible. They cannot leave the dimensions they are in to become external observers.

Incarnation: Entering the Maze

This is fairly standard stuff, but it is the converse of this fact that I think is of interest to us theologically. Those within the torus cannot properly concieve of life outside of it, but nor can those in a higher dimension properly conceive what life is like within it.

Walking in the gardens of a large country house the other day I was struck by the parallels with solving a maze. To the external observer, looking from above, solving a maze may take time, but is essentially a trivial task: you just look for the route to the middle. But this big-picture perspective is totally unavailable to those who are in the maze on the ground. For them the only possible way to solve it is to engage with it and experience it, to walk it step by step. There can be no abstract solution.

This, I think, is a profound truth about the incarnation: it was necessary for God to enter our dimensional space, because the ‘abstract solution’ from above was insufficient. It was only by walking the maze himself that God in Christ could empathise fully with the human situation. Or, as Zizek has put it in The Monstrosity of Christ:

“Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.”

Human experience, God learns, has no abstract solution. It must be lived to be understood. So the incarnation is not simply essential for us, but, strangely, essential for God too.

What this required, put in quantum terms, was the ‘collapse of the divine wave function’ into a specific space-time. And as to what the hell that means, I’ll try an explanation in the next post.

Another interesting aspect of the new physics is the problem of multidimensionality. Theorists are currently working with a model that demands a universe with 11 dimensions… a full 8 more than we can reasonably cope with in our now narrow 3D one. Or perhaps 9 more than most of us deal with from behind our screens.

The difficulty of imagining these great dimensions is beautifully explored by Edwin Abbott Abbott in his book ‘Flatland.’ In it he describes a world which is entirely two dimensional – and thus completely flat. The protagonist – ‘Square’ – is visited in Flatland by a sphere… but Square simply cannot understand what a sphere might be until he visits Spaceland.

We can imagine Square’s problem: picture a black sphere passing through a completely flat piece of plain paper. All the paper ‘sees’ is a growing circle of black, which then shrinks again. And there is nothing that someone in Flatland can do to prove that what just happened was 3D.

This is the fundamental problem of our physical universe. There is no experiment that we can do to test whether an observed experiment carries with it another dimension. We can create 3D representations of 4D space, just as we can draw pictures on paper that appear to have 3D perspective… but these representations do not ‘work’ in reality. They can never give the full picture.

We might say then that it is ridiculous for science to demand a ‘proof’ of God’s existence, or of people of faith to try to offer one. There is nothing Square can do to convince his fellow Flatlanders that a sphere exists. It becomes a matter of faith. But that a sphere saw fit to try to engage Flatland is interesting in itself, and is the subject of the next post.

I strongly believe that these lines are far softer that perhaps we’d like to think, and what I’d like to do in the following few posts is hold up some pointers as to why that might be the case. Before I get to the meat of this first post, I want to make something clear: I don’t believe that Quantum Physics provides any proof of God. I don’t think a ‘God Particle’ will be discovered. What I think the new physics does do though, is force us to think more carefully about what we think we know, whether we be scientists or theologians or both.

The Science

One book that I have mentioned here before and which I thoroughly recommend to those interested in taking things further is Quantum by Manjit Kumar. In it he outlines the argument that blew up between Einstein – who ironically began the whole quantum school of thought – and Niels Bohr – who was the foremost proponent of radical quantum theory. The argument was important because it centred on what the nature of reality was. And what can be more important than that?

Historically, classical physics was optimistic about understanding matter. Physicists believed that as technology and experimental equipment improved they would eventually be able to look an atom, or a subatomic particle even, straight in the eye. It was simply a question of more accurate observation and measurement. However, in 1926 a quantum-leaning physicist called Werner Heisenberg outlined what has become known as the ‘uncertainty principle’. This states that it is impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously. Simply put: in order to observe a particle a measuring instrument has to get some information from it. At the limit of observation, this can be done using one single photon of light, which bounces off the particle being observed and is then registered by the instrument. Under normal circumstances – like reading a thermometer – this is fine. But when the particle you are observing becomes so small, the impact with the photon actually changes the momentum of the particle. Your observation of it has actually changed it in some way.

This precipitated a huge crisis in physics. If Heisenberg was right, was it even possible to observe or measure anything accurately? On the one hand, Niels Bohr became more convinced that atoms and subatomic particles could never be modelled in terms anything more than metaphor. There was nothing but abstract mathematics at the core: no ‘orbiting particle’ model, no ‘plum pudding’ model; we would never be able to draw what an atom actually looked like. Everything was uncertain, shape-shifting wave functions that ‘collapsed’ into states we were looking for when we wanted them to. Einstein resisted this. He was convinced that the quantum concept would be superseded by something more fundamental, a model that would describe everything properly, and would be understandable in a physical way. For Einstein, real things did exist. For Bohr, they existed only when we observed them.

The Theology

What are the implications for theology? Primarily, I think the argument between classical and quantum physics parallels quite nicely with the interaction between ‘classic’ and ‘emerging’ church. My experience in the 90′s, with Toronto etc. was that people in the charismatic, evangelical wing of the church really believed that they would soon achieve total immanence with God. God was almost touchable. If only we could sing that bit harder and be zapped that tiny bit more we would actually achieve full communion. When this didn’t happen, it precipitated a crisis among many of those of my generation. We felt cheated, and retreated into ‘alt.worship’ where we explored a ‘quantum theology’ where God was pure equations, transcendent and immensurable.

It seems now that both positions are wrong. While Einstein is yet to be vindicated, most physicists are skeptical about the ‘hard’ quantum model, and feel that some new theory will supersede it, even though Heisenberg’s principle is unbreachable. God, I think we are learning again, is both immanent and transcendent, but never entirely one or the other. Uncertainty remains.

And so it is with all our knowledge. Those on the side of The Reason Project will want to claim hard facts and cold truth, as will those on the side of fundamentalism. But it doesn’t take a genius like Einstein to see that human experience has always been far more comfortable in the uncertain place in between these positions, and it’s to that uncertain place that I want to go in the next post, where we’ll take a look at other dimensions.